Skywatchers should be on alert for possible geomagnetic storms this week that may trigger colorful displays of auroras.

Today on April 11th at 7:16 UT (3:16 am ET) a large, Earth- facing group of sunspots hurled a massive cloud of plasma and charged particles into space. Heading towards our planet at high speed, the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was first spotted by NASA’s sun-monitoring satellite , the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and is expected to slam into Earth’s protective magnetic field sometime in the early morning hours of April 13th.